This is a very strange — and to me, sad — book. It was Morchiladze’s first novel, published in 1992, and describes the journey of two young men from Tbilisi to Armenia. As Georgia began to recover from civil war, they wind up in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. There they are held as captives, first by the Azeris, then by the Armenians. The lead character, Gio, is a bit of a lost soul — but that’s an understatement. He is neither good nor bad, certainly not ambitious, and the purpose of his trip is to buy some drugs for a dealer friend of his in Tbilisi. The story is largely about his relationships to other people — his father, his girlfriend back home, his best mate (who he repeatedly describes an an ‘idiot’), his captors (or are they really captors?). That’s part of the charm of the book – we see everything through his eyes, and it’s not always clear if he’s a reliable witness to what is going on. There is a scene at the end which takes place, I think, entirely in Gio’s imagination. I said that the book is sad because it is pretty obvious from early on that nothing very good is going to happen to Gio and his ‘idiot’ friend. The Georgia which Morchiladze describes — the first tumultuous years following the collapse of the Soviet Union — now belongs to another era. Fortunately.